Category: On Writing
My Grandmother Was an Elf!
Have you ever wanted to know an elf? I’ve known them, all my life. I hail from an Irish family, which is why the gift of gab comes so easily, and why I’ve always been enchanted by elves. Maybe that’s why we named our production company Elfenworks. Hello! You don’t know me, because my work […]
We Are the Stories
They named him Emir, after those powerful Arab rulers. He was an Ardennes draft horse, a roan gelding in a village in southwest Sweden. Why that name? His world was one of fog and snow, and summers so brief you hardly knew them, not one of palaces and sand dunes shimmering with heat. Barely a […]
Writing Ireland’s Social History
How a tragedy and a passion to give voice caused me to self-publish my debut fiction novel focusing on Ireland’s Social History. Back in March 2017 I was not a person who religiously watched the daily news bulletins or read the daily news-papers. On March 3rd last year I called my mother to wish her […]
My Road To Publication
My debut novel, a psychological thriller called Keep You Safe is published on 17th August. It follows the story of Natalie, who is convicted of a crime she can’t remember committing and separated from her baby son, Harry, for over three years. Her husband has divorced her and taken their son to live on the […]
Becoming Starlight: an Excerpt
Becoming Starlight Excerpted from Becoming Starlight: A Shared Death Journey from Darkness to Light by Sharon Prentice, PhD. Copyright © 2018 by Sharon Prentice. https://sharonprentice.com Heaven. There are many different words for it in many different languages. And each day, it’s a “place” that’s referred to more than any other in the world. Why? Every […]
Will The Real Kinsey Millhone Please Stand Up? –How a Private Investigator Became a Writer
Those of you who are mystery lovers will need no explanation with regard to the title of this piece: Kinsey Millhone is a fictional private investigator who stars in 25 novels penned by the late great Sue Grafton, spanning 36 years and the alphabet from A to Y. I was already a state of California […]
The Unexpected Writing Prompt that Began My Career
I never wanted to be a writer much less an author. Two negative experiences in the classroom convinced me I did not have that talent. In high school, an English teacher I greatly admired reviewed a poem I’d written about the death of my beloved dog. She told me the poem was “maudlin,” a term […]
How Writing Changed My Life
Wings of a Flying Tiger is a heroic tale in which ordinary Chinese risked their lives to rescue and safeguard a downed American pilot in WWII in China. It is a work of fiction. But to me, a Chinese-American, it is also personal. My mother and grandma had lived in Nanking and escaped from the […]
THE ONE-EYED QUEEN: Inspo and Sanity
What inspires me to write is that I’ll go insane if I don’t. It’s very motivating. My first recollection of using it as a coping mechanism, I’m not sure how old I was. Four, maybe five, unable to sleep because I was certain there was a tangle of snakes under my bed. I crept to […]
On Writing: Ausma Zehanat Khan
Crime fiction has no shortage of gutsy, brilliant and intriguingly flawed heroines, so when I set about writing my own mystery series, I knew I wanted one of my detectives to embody those same qualities. Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty are partners who work at Community Policing, a unit that investigates crimes that impact minority […]
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